The Book Shopper

Upping the Worm Game

As an amateur vermi-composter  – who has been raising worms for his own personal consumption for several years (that doesn’t sound quite right), I have recently been inspired to take my worm works operation to a new level. Heretofore I have been content with a simple, blue plastic tub, drilled with air holes and partially filled with red wiggler worms, selected food scraps, and newspaper. Shown here are the worms enjoying a print advertisement  promoting the Ernest Hemingway PBS documentary. Given the novelist’s fear of death, my worms appreciate the taste of irony, as much as avocado and melon rinds.

My renewed commitment began while I was browsing in the section of R.J. Ruppenthal’s Fresh Food from Small Places (2008), where he gives easy-to-follow instructions on how to build a simple worm operation for the home. Ruppenthal also does a shoutout for Amy Stewart’s The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms (2005), which he describes as “not a ‘how-to book’, but a reflection and synthesis of wisdom on the achievements of earthworms and their importance to human civilization.” Intrigued, I obtained a copy and started reading.

The Earth Moved

Stewart begins her book with a chapter on Charles Darwin, who studied worms with the same diligence exhibited during the naturalist’s famous voyage on the Beagle, which eventually led to his providing additional evidence to the theories of evolution.  Just before his death in 1882, Darwin captured this fascination with earthworms and their effects on enriching soil in his The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Actions of Worms.  

Stewart goes on to explain how earthworms including the red wigglers or Eisenia fetida (as I now call them) work their magic on nematodes, coffee grounds, manure, bacteria, and fungi. Along the way I was able to glean tips on doing a better job with my bin full of critters.

Folded in throughout the book are interviews with researchers and “field trips” to places such an experimental sewage treatment plant in Pacifica, California where earthworms are part of the process of turning human waste into usable biosolids for agriculture. Along the way,  Stewart never loses her light-hearted anecdotal style that makes the book such a pleasure.  For example, in this passage she explains why she has not gone into the Big Worm business.

For one thing, I’d run into the same problem selling worm castings that I would if I were to go into the business selling chocolate or tawny port; I’d keep all the inventory for myself. I buy compost by the truckload for my annual mulching of the flower beds. I have to buy it because my worms only produce a few cubic feet of castings each season. If I had enough worms to generate truckloads of castings, my farm would still have only one customer: me.

I will take heed of Stewart's advice to limit my own personal consumption.

Worm Connoisseurs

Providing some additional inspiration and reflection on our natural world is Deborah Warren's short book of poems, Connoisseurs of Worms (2021). In her sixty-five poems Warren seamlessly mixes references to Greek mythology, classical paintings, as well as modern life (one poem is even entitled "PETscan"). She deeps dives into all creatures great and small, ranging from zebras, "Titian-haired" orangutans, to moles and a worm dietary favorite - nematodes. A good example of how she can work these seemingly disparate themes into one poem is demonstrated in "Mosquito in the Heart."

 

Mosquito in the Heart

There's nothing viable on the EKG.

So says the cardiologist.

Wrong. Clearly he missed

some small anomaly:

 

With an incessant and insistent hiss

under my left ribs—a falsetto whine,

whetting its proboscis,

it flits and ricochets around my heart.

 

The doctor's diagnosis?

He'd call it a feint of heart—if he had the wit:

He doesn't. He's just content to be smart,

and here's his opinion: It's anxiety.

It isn't in your heart—it's in your mind.

There's medication; often meditation

helps with tension. And he won't admit

that coronary insects do exist.

 

Just paranoia? I'm not buying it:

He'll give me white lies but—when I insist—

refer me to Cardioentomology.

You don't have to be a vermi-composter to appreciate her wit and small wisdoms. Just someone who can take time out to examine life all around us, including what is beneath our feet. 

 

The Force Is Always With You

What do binder clips, ballpoint pens, tape measures, can openers and large bridges (like the Navajo Bridge in northern Arizona) have in common? They are all part of the invisible world of forces that impact our daily lives, and they are discussed in Henry Petroski's Force: What It Means to Push and Pull, Slip and Grip, Start and Stop (2022).

Force examines a host of scientific, physical, and mathematical topics without burying us in technical jargon. Petrosky mixes anecdotes about his life extending back to his childhood playing with the Tricky Dog dog magnet (Chapter 2 - Magnetism) or in Chapter 13 when he reminisces about watching a clerk in a bakery slice a loaf of bread and then flawlessly place it inside a plastic bag (pg. 164). He writes:

"The clearance between the contents and container appeared to be as tight as a piston in a cylinder. She left the bag open, lest the fresh bread be crushed in the course of closing it. She did not have to be so careful with a loaf of rye bread because its crust gave it both stiffness and strength to resist. Watching the whole seamless process and imagining the forces involved was to me the greatest thing since sliced bread itself."

Reading Force will change how one looks at some of the simplest objects like the binder clip and ballpoint pen (Chapter 12 - Stretching and Squeezing), the can opener (Chapter 6, - Lever, Lever, Cantilever), and the tape measure (Chapter 14 - Deployable Structures). You will even feel a little better about yourself when you learn that your fingerprints wear thinner and lose some of their tactile qualities, which explains why I drop more objects (like pens, clips, and tape measures) than I used to. 

This doesn't mean that Petrosky doesn't tackle bigger engineering feats like bridges, arches and domes, and obelisks. As he describes the reasons behind famous bridge collapses you may be thankful that bridge repair is part of the Federal infrastructure plan. 

 

Filling the Sports Void

Let's face it we're sick of football. College basketball really doesn't start until March; pro basketball until mid-April. As for my favorite sport baseball, I refuse to fill up on empty Spring Training calories before Opening Day. This leaves a big sports void in the month of February and I usually fill it with a good baseball book, but this year things worked out a little differently. By consensus our two-person book group, selected a sports/history book to kickoff 2023—David Maraniss’s  Path Lit by Lightning: The Story of Jim Thorpe (2022).

If you are like me, you were probably familiar with the Thorpe name as some great athlete who played sports early in the 20th Century, residing in the black-and-white team photograph corner of your mind.  Reading Maraniss’s detailed biography of Thorpe’s life changed all that. I can now pick Thorpe out of this picture of the Carlisle Indians football team (middle row, third from the right).

Football Days

Thorpe was born in 1887 on a Sac and Fox reservation near Prague Oklahoma, twenty years before Oklahoma became a state. When he was 17, Thorpe was sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and ended up playing football for the legendary (albeit somewhat undeserving) Pop Warner in 1907 (top row, wearing a suit). In the early days of football, Carlisle, though it was not a college, played many of the college power houses of the time: Army, Penn, Harvard and Pitt. In 1912 they finished with a 9-1-1 record including an historically significant victory against Army (the pre-game pep talk where Warner reminded his team what the U.S. Army had done to their ancestors). In the game Thorpe was knocked cold by future president Dwight D. Eisenhower. Since there was no such thing as concussion protocol then, Thorpe later returned to the game.  

At Carlisle, Thorpe was also introduced to track and field, which matched well with his overall athleticism. By today’s standards he was not that big —about 175-185 pounds, but he was all muscle, speed, toughness, and agility. Thorpe represented America in the pentathlon and decathlon in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm where he won two gold medals. (Maraniss points out that ironically, even though Thorpe was a Native American he had to sign a form that he was an American before competing.)   Sadly, within a year he was stripped of those medals because he had been paid as a professional minor league baseball player. Later Thorpe played 269 games in six seasons at the major league level, mostly for the New York Giants, but this clip from Total Baseball confirms that he had trouble hitting the curveball.

Thorpe was prominent in the early history of professional football along with the likes of Red Grange and George Halas. He was the league's first president, though mostly because of his athletic fame.

More than Sports

Although the first half of the Path Lit is about the early days of the Olympics, football and some baseball, the book is also about the politics and policies of assimilation, racism towards Native Americans, and several chapters on life in Hollywood in late 40s and early 50s. In 1951, Burt Lancaster starred in a movie made about Thorpe's life.  Michael Curtiz of Casablanca fame directed it. 

But Thorpe had many troubles. Maraniss summarizes them all: "his struggles with alcohol, his nomadic lifestyle, his Sisyphean cycle of finding and losing jobs, his bad luck and mistreatment, his [three] dysfunctional marriages, his time away from his sons and daughters when they were young.” However, despite their difficult upbringings Thorpe's children grew up to become military officers, government workers, college graduates, and Native American activists. 

Maraniss is evenhanded in his biography neither completely blaming Thorpe or the white-dominated society for Thorpes woes nor completely absolving either of them.  It's complicated and that is one of the strengths of the book is Maraniss has taken great effort to put the athlete's life in historical context. (It's one of the weaknesses too -- sometime too much detail.). Perhaps Thorpe summed up his own life best when he said after having his medals unjustly taken away, "Once I had made up my mind to face the world with the truth, I was no longer worried about the matter. I adopted a fatalistic viewpoint and considered the episode just another event on the red man's life of ups and downs.'

Jim Thorpe died in a trailer park in California from a heart attack in 1953, but the news traveled around the world as fast as communications would allow. After all, just a few years earlier in 1950, sportswriters from the Associated Press voted him by a wide margin the Greatest Athlete in the first half of the 20th century, 

Thorpe had quite a sports career and a life, which provided Maraniss with more than enough material to fill my reading off- season.

 

Mushroom Anthropology Notes

On The Book Shopper's companion blog there is my brief review of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015). It is entitled "Mushroom Induced Reading." 

Or you can take a peek at my reading notes (which are kind of like an index). Click on image of the notes if you wish to enlarge the "fine" print. 

Guest Posting: Anais Nin and Henry Miller

Preface: This posting comes from my longtime friend Dave Dintenfass who lives in Seattle. Our friendship dates back to 1979 while I was training to be a board operator at public radio station WILL in Champaign-Urbana Illinois. Dave was a student who was assigned to train me on the night and weekend shifts. (One advantage of those late hours is that I was paid to read while listening to classical music.) 

Dave has influenced my writing, my taste in books and my passion for book shopping throughout the decades. He offered to share his recent thoughts on revisiting Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller. It reminds me of the kind of conversations we have had about books.  Dave writes:

I finished Anaïs Nin: A Biography by Diedre Bair (Penguin Books, 1995). This was a borrow from one of the ubiquitous Free Little Library kiosks here in Seattle.

A bit of a slog given its length but very well written and comprehensive in the way that most biographies are not. Of course, there was the benefit of access to the famous diaries so documenting the life of perhaps one of the most outrageously narcissistic literary figures wasn't quite the challenge that you might assume. Or perhaps the challenge here was not for lack of research material but rather for an overwhelmingly generous supply of it. Accordingly, a comprehensive biography like this is not small. Did I mention the book is nearly 700 pages?

I felt Ms. Bair really tried to remain neutral about her subject despite meticulous evidence of just how unpleasant Anaïs Nin was. We are examining the life here of a spoiled, manipulative, monumentally self-absorbed woman—a pathological liar and completely ungenerous person who was clearly morally untethered in just about every regard. Anaïs Nin was clearly her own worst enemy but to her credit, she was not afraid to detail it all in her infamous diaries.

Like most of us, I only knew of her work by association with Henry Miller (which actually was only a very brief time in the Paris of the early 1930s) and some of the works only available posthumously (including The Delta of Venus). I did check out some of her short fiction published during her lifetime (from archive.org) and I have to say, while these short pieces were beautifully written, they lack any sort of compelling story, and they seem actually rather shallow and utterly bereft of any humanity. But then I feel the same way about Lawrence Durrell's fiction—it remains a mystery to me why it is so highly praised; I find it incomprehensible. But Your Mileage May Vary. 

All this encouraged me to re-read Tropic of Cancer as it's been many years since I read any Henry Miller. I could say this 1934 novel hasn't held up but after reading it again 45 years later, it's clear to me it didn't hold up the first time I read it. Notwithstanding the long interval between readings, I vividly recall that my youthful impression was the same as now. Despite occasional flashes of dark humor and playful narrative, the book is much too long (over 300 pages in the Castle Books reprint of the famous 1961 Grove edition) and even more rambling and unfocused than The Great White Whale of my literary interest, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. (I'm not suggesting here any other equivalence between these two works, just that the Bellow book captivated my interest for years until I had the misfortune to finally read the thing from end-to-end with great disappointment.)

If Miller had boiled it down to 30 or 40 of the best pages, it might be viewed today as a compelling (though youthfully immature) riff on impoverished bohemian aimlessness in depression-era Paris. Curiously, it's when the narrator leaves Paris near the end of the novel (to teach English at a parochial school in Dijon) that some of the most focused and insightful writing emerges. In fact, I would suggest the last 50 pages of the book are probably its best.

I might revisit Miller’s other infamous early work, Tropic of Capricorn, written a few years after Cancer. When I last read it 45 years ago, I recalled it was a much better book. I’m not so sure now but it’s worth a go.

 Thanks, Dave, for thinking of the blog and recommending to me which books to read and avoid.

My History with the Dos Passos Trilogy

The first thing that captured my imagination about the Dos Passos's U.S.A. Trilogy was the clever artwork of the Signet Classics, which were prominently displayed in the bookstores of my college youth. I finally bought them, and they stayed on my shelves for a number of years. I do not recall when I finally read them, but I did it over a period of years, probably during the 1990s. 

The Signet Classics were notable because they each contained an introduction by writer and literary critic Alfred Kazin, who summarized the three books of the trilogy —The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)— as a portrayal of America before it became a superpower. We grew up thinking of America as that way, but Kazin reminds us that America was a raw and often brutal country in the first quarter of the 20th century. (To better understand significance of Dos Passos's work, check out the essay by James Mustich, author of 1000 Books to Read Before You Die, E Pluribus Unum. On John Dos Passos's U.S.A.)

Kazin writes that Dos Passos shows how the rich men of America (characterized by J. P. Morgan) controlled the lives of working men and women. The average man or woman didn't have a chance against the "mass culture, mass superstition and mass slogans" perpetrated by the powerful.

Another memorable aspect of the Signet Classics is that they were illustrated by Reginald Marsh (1898-1954) who drew for The New Yorker in the 1920s but went on to become an artist of some renown and a contemporary of the more well-known Thomas Hart Benton.  Marsh was known for his "depictions of life in New York City in the 1920s and 30s." (Wikipedia). A sample of Marsh's work graces the cover of earlier paperbacks, shown at the left.

Flashback and Flashforward - 192 Books

In September 2014, my partner Denise and I did a self-guided bookstore tour in the Chelsea section of New York City, which I wrote about in the posting Chelsea Lit Crawl. 

Usually if I like a new bookstore, I will make an effort to purchase something and at 192 Books, I bought the Library of America edition of the U.S.A. trilogy, which wrapped Dos Passo's work into a single volume. I replaced my tattered paperbacks. not knowing whether I would ever pick it up again and reread it.

For those not familiar with the Library of America, it is a nonprofit publisher championed by critic Edmund Wilson (1895 - 1974), which published its first book in 1982.  LOA has since then published 300 volumes of works ranging from poetry, novels, crime writing, science fiction, essays and journalism.

This summer our GRSG book (support) group selected The 42nd Parallel— partly I suspect because I had this book waiting on my shelf. Since the LOA edition is printed on "premium acid-free lightweight opaque paper that...will not turn yellow or brittle for centuries," the book was in mint condition.  The Smyth-sewn bindings also ensured "that the books open easily and lie flat without crinkling or buckling." 

Though I miss the Kazin commentary and the Reginald Marsh artwork of the Signet paperbacks, this edition more than makes up for it because it includes a Dos Passos's biographical timeline, a chronology of world events, and some annotation (including timely translations of some French phrases). All helpful because the U.S.A. trilogy is a history of America, which included many characters galivanting around Europe during the first World War. (The characters in 1919 spend their time in the Parisian and Italian cafés far away from the front.)

I am not sure that Dos Passos is for everybody but if you look at some of LOA's other offerings, I am sure you can find something of interest. And don't worry, you don't have to read it right away.

Just a sample

 

 

Inside Grant’s Tome

Our book group has just finished reading Ron Chernow’s voluminous biography Grant (2017), which illuminated a period of American history that we knew little about.  Chernow uses the life of Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1888) to give us perspectives on the Mexican War, the coming storm between the North and the South, the Civil War, and the continued strife and violence against blacks who were denied their full rights for decades after the war.

Heretofore, Grant was perhaps best known for two things: the Union General who defeated Robert E. Lee ending the Civil War only because he had superior numbers and resources and secondly, as the two-term 18th President of the United States whose administration was embroiled in corruption and scandal.

Chernow dispels both of these harsh judgements. Although in the early part of his life “Grant had been a failure, battered by life at every turn,” his life changed as dramatically as if it were a fairytale.  An 1843 graduate of West Point Grant served in the Mexican War but left the military in 1854 under duress.  As an unsuccessful businessman mostly because he was susceptible to being duped, he was barely able to support his family. Suffering from alcoholic binges did not make things any easier. When the Civil War broke out in 1860, he was a shopkeeper in Galena, Illinois. Eight years later he was a war hero and President of the United States.

General Grant

Unlike Lee who was tactician in battle, Grant was a strategist who led the Union to early victories at Fort Donelson, Fort Henry, (Shiloh not so much) and then went on to capture Vicksburg in 1863—a campaign rated by military historians “a masterpiece, the preeminent campaign waged by any general during the war.” His army suffered horrible losses against Lee in Virginia in the summer of 1864, where he was called "Grant the Butcher" by northern critics.  Eventually he cornered Lee in an untenable defensive position that ultimately led to the end of the war. Chernow writes:

“Grant was the strategic genius produced by the Civil War. He set clear goals, communicated them forcefully, and instilled them in his men. While Lee stuck to Virginia, Grant grasped the war in its totality, masterminding the movements of all Union armies (including Sherman’s).  It was Grant who best apprehended the strategic interactions of the eastern and western theatre.”

President Grant

Unfortunately, the corruption and scandal of Grant’s presidency overshadowed his relentless efforts to give newly freed blacks not only the right to vote, but the ability to do so without risking their lives. Chernow does not gloss over the scandals, but he establishes that it wasn’t Grant who was corrupt himself.  But Grant had major flaw in trusting the wrong people who took advantage of him throughout his life (unlike his alcoholism which he controlled through total abstinence).

An abolitionist before the war (more so than Abraham Lincoln) Grant was a fervent believer that blacks should be able to vote without intimidation, hold office and during his first term he enacted laws to strengthen the rights to vote.  He used Federal troops to disembowel the nascent Ku Klux Klan “unquestionably the worst outbreak of domestic terrorism in American History” writes Chernow, and he created the Department of Justice to indict and convict over a thousand Klansman.  (A reincarnation of the Klan was formed in the 1920s.) In other words, there was only a short period of reprieve before the white Southerners and Democrat power structure formed new militant groups. This coupled with Northern “Reconstruction fatigue” led the evaporation of voting rights for blacks. (During Lincoln and Grant's tenure it was the Republicans who were the champions of Reconstruction and securing the rights of blacks. The Democrats where the party of the white Southerners who had no intention to succumbing to new order proposed by Lincoln.)

Chernow maintains that it would be another 96 years after Grant (1968) that another fair election would be held in many parts of the South.  “Slavery had been abolished,” writes Chernow, “but it had been replaced by a caste-ridden form of second-class citizenship for southern blacks, and that counted as a national shame.”

Post Presidency

 After serving two terms in office Grant made a two-year world tour, but upon his return stateside failed to win the Republican party's nomination in 1880. At the end of his life, he was swindled in a Ponzi scheme that left him penniless. Moreover, he soon he was in declining in health from throat cancer. Fortunately, an important writer and publisher of the time—Mark Twain—understood that he could restore Grant’s wealth by publishing the general’s memoirs. While in intense pain, Grant finished his two volume Personal Memoirs just a month before his death and it eventually sold 300,000 copies which provided Grant's devoted wife Julia with generous royalties.

More About the Book Group

In the spirit of transparency. our book group—consists of just two people (easy to schedule get togethers and everyone reads the book!) and it began in the summer of 2020 as a way for two college chums and new retirees to "support" each other to read challenging books and avoid inflicting our "intellectual" chatter on loved ones. Our first book was Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and have just finished Chernow. We keep notes, ramblings, observations, (sometimes irreverent like a comparison between Ulysses S. Grant and Donald Trump) on our discussion board available here (but you must scroll down).

And you can order the book Grant from our blog partner Destination: Books.

Life Under Totalitarianism

For a better understanding for what life is like under totalitarianism (and what the Ukrainians are fighting for/against) check out the works of Josef Škvoreckؘý (1924-2012). I just finished reading two of his novellas Emὃke (1963, tr. 1977) and The Bass Saxophone (1967, tr. 1977), which are combined in a single volume with an introductory piece "Red Music." Škvoreckؘý played saxophone with a jazz group Red Music growing up in Czechoslovakia. In 1968, the Soviets removed the Czech reformist government with an invasion of a half-a-million troops, crushing the budding Prague Spring. Škvoreckؘý and his wife emigrated to Canada where he became a professor and started a publishing company that made the works of banned Czech writers available throughout the world and to his fellow countryman.

This is not the first time I have read the prolific Škvoreckؘý.  When my partner Denise and I were in the Czech Republic in the fall of 2019 on vacation, I took a copy of his short detective novel The End of Lieutenant Bovurka (1975) with me. After reading it and I picked up a copy The Return of Lieutenant Bovurka (1991) at the English language bookstore Shakespeare near the Franz Kafka Museum. In each book the melancholic detective Bovurka must walk a tightrope of solving crimes and resisting the Communist regime. These books reinforced the sentiment expressed by our middle-aged tour guide over drafts of Pilsner Urquell as he described the suppression in Czechoslovakia under the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. 

The Memorial to the Victims of Communism (shown above) in the Lesser Town Area of Prague serves as a reminder who disappeared during the Soviet regime.

Last fall when I went to Germany (the former East German cities of Cottbus and Dresden) to visit my older daughter Cynthia, I took a copy of Škvoreckؘý’s most well-known work the voluminous The Engineer of Human Souls (1977, tr. 1984) The narrator Danny Smiricky (considered Škvoreckؘý’s alter-ego in many of his novels – like Philip Roth’s Zuckerman) has emigrated from Czechoslovakia and is a professor in Toronto. Smiricky mixes his recollections of living under German occupation with ex-pats in Canada wrestling with their guilt in leaving Europe.  Because of all the characters and the time switches, the book is a challenging read and I’ll admit I did not finish it. (More my shortcoming than the book’s).

Despite the grim settings of oppression under totalitarian regimes, there is an element of humor/absurdity in his many of writings and in the links below there is a prime example from The Bass Saxophone.

Related Links

 A lengthy tribute to Škvoreckؘý from Paul Wilson in the Guardian who translated The Engineer of Human Souls to English. (Its title refers to Stalin's description of writers),

A Škvoreckؘý passage from the introduction to The Bass Saxophone listing the Nazis 10 Rules to Combat Jazz.  Note: The best way to buy this out-of-print book is through Alibris. Make sure you get the copy that includes the Introductory "Red Music". The easiest way to get the correct copy is type the ISBN number 0-671-55681-9 in the search bar at Alibris Books.

And The Book Shopper Blog has a couple of postings that mention similar books. “In Best Books Read of 2019"I write about sending a book about Trump’s impending impeachment over the Ukraine scandal to then Georgia Senator David Perdue.  Another posting "Tyranny, Voting and Making Love for the Last Time" is a shoutout to Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny (2017). (Since then, a graphic version of the book is available at Destination: Books, a reluctantly proud blog sponsor.)

Be vigilant, especially here in Georgia where they have made it much more difficult to vote.

Two Different Travel Books

This month I have read two travel books, neither of which you would find on the shelf next to your Fodors, Lonely Planets, or Anthony Bourdains. Both books are not your normal travel fanfare.

Norman Lock’s A Boy in His Winter: An American Novel (2014) is an imaginative revisiting of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In Part One (July 2, 1835 to August 29, 2005), the narrator Huck Finn travels down the Mississippi River with his companion the slave Jim, but the two are stuck in a time warp where they don’t age even though the voyage itself lasts for decades. Off the river, time has marched on, as Huck and Jim witness a Civil War battle at Vicksburg, and later meet a veteran of the Great War. Tom Sawyer makes a few cameo appearances along the way but unlike Huck or Jim, Tom grows older.

While Huck and Jim are traveling companions, they are not close friends because of the chasm of race. Jim knows that a black man in the South lives in peril and it is something that the youthful Huck in his ignorance doesn’t understand. In one instance, Huck asks:

“ 'Jim, do you believe in free will?'

'Is there a more ridiculous question to ask a slave?' he said, laughing.

And for a moment I hated him."

In the second part (August, 29, 2005 to September 11, 2005) Huck arrives at the mouth of the river south of New Orleans the same day as hurricane Katrina. His raft is gone (and so is Jim) and he joins a three-man crew of a charter boat who are running drugs from New Orleans up the Atlantic coast during the post-Katrina chaos. Lock is able to capture how a thirteen-year-old boy views the 21st century, who is both innocent yet worldly enough to survive. In Part 3 (September 12, 2005 to March 15, 2077) Huck, since he is no longer tied to the river, is beginning to age and the old Huck reflects more on his young life.  Hence the title A Boy in His Winter.

It's an unusual premise, and I am usually skeptical of derivative works (like sequels, prequels), but Lock who has reimagined several other American classics in his The American Novel series (all with Bellevue Literary Press) writes well taking on a time-traveling Huckleberry Finn adventure.

Remembering Turkey

The other book is Michael Pereira’s Mountains and a Shore: A Journey Through Southern Turkey. Originally published in 1966, Paul Dry Books republished the book in 2015. In this thin travelogue, Pereira combines the history of the country with his solo travels along the southern Mediterranean coastline and Taurus Mountains. Because Pereira speaks Turkish and insists on traveling the way that the locals do: by foot, by donkey if necessary, and the most common mode of transportation— the bus. He writes:

“…the role played by buses is of immense importance, and I came away with nothing but admiration for them and their drivers. For they have to contend with the trains, bridges washed away or simply non-existent, and, by no means the least, other Turkish drivers.

To help them overcome these hazards they very reasonably enlist the help of the Almighty, and in the space above the windscreen is always written some brief prayer or exhortation. Some of these are pious rather than comforting, such as: ‘May God protect you!’ and others, to my mind, needlessly eschatological: ‘Forget not thy God!’… The most popular of all, however, is the single word ‘Maşallah’, which used in much the same way as a Spaniard uses the sign of the cross to avert danger.”

You feel every bump in the road as he travels the mountainous swerving roads often overlooking the Mediterranean. Pereira’s purposely traveled to an area of a country that he believed would be much more developed in the upcoming decades.

His descriptions of the kebabs, and the centuries-old churches and muezzins’ calls to prayers from the minarets reminded me of my trip to Turkey with my partner Denise in 201o. Books like Pereira’s expand what I normally think of as a travel book. Sometimes you read a travel book with a purpose to plan an upcoming trip or to be a companion while traveling, but Mountains and A Shore, provided a respite from our daily routine by reliving memories of our trip to this fascinating country. (I cannot forget our visit to the Hagia Sophia and the pickle shop in Istanbul.)

It is just as Dave Mason wrote in the Forward to Pereira’s book: “All travel is time travel.”

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Both books are available at the Destination: Books Book Shopper portal. When you purchase an independently book through site, we earn an affiliate commission.

 

Baseball Respite

I usually read more baseball books in the off-season than during the summer months. Since the players and the owners are currently at an impasse with no end sight, my needs are even more pronounced. Moreover, baseball books provide me with more relaxed material in contrast to the intense fare that I have been reading lately. Books about climate (the eco-anthology All We Can Save), an explanative history of the rise of nationalism (Age of Anger) and the story of the London cholera epidemic of 1854 (The Ghost Map) have been interesting, but unsettling. None of these books are something you want to read in the evening near bedtime. That’s where a calming book of old-timey baseball stories can be most appreciated. And I miss baseball.

My solution has been Baseball: When the Grass Was Real (1976), by writer-poet Donald Honig who travelled around the country collecting the narratives of the men who played baseball in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.  Earlier Lawrence Ritter put together a similar book, The Glory of the Times (1966), which gathered oral histories of players who played in the early part of the 20th century. (Honig acknowledges Ritter’s efforts in his Introduction). To those viewers of the Ken Burns' documentary, some of the players have familiar sounding names ( e.g., Lefty Grove, Bob Feller). Honig also includes less familiar but melodic names (Big Johnny Mize, Max Lanier) made famous in Dave Frishberg’s musical paean to baseball players, "Van Lingle Mungo".

Honig allows the players to speak in their own vernacular taking advantage of their storytelling skills. But in addition to the 18 players selected, these players also include their personal anecdotes of being teammates and contemporaries of Hall of Famers, Ted Williams*, Joe DiMaggio, Dizzy Dean and Jackie Robinson to name but a few. Some notable stories include:

Billy Herman was a Hall of Famer who played from 1931- 47 mostly for the Chicago Cubs. He was an eyewitness to Babe Ruth's pointing to the centerfield stands and calling his shot before hitting a home run in the 1932 World Series. But from his position at second base Herman confirms that it is a great story but incorrect, because the Cub pitcher that day was the extremely competitive Charlie Root.  Herman says that Ruth was pointing two fingers at Root (not at centerfield) and that Root only had two strikes on him. “But he didn’t point," says Herman," “Don’t kid yourself. I can tell you just what would have happened if Ruth had tried that—he would have never got a pitch to hit. Root would have had him with his feet up in the air. I told you Charlie Root was a mean man on that mound.”

Herman also was an eyewitness to boxing match-brawl between Ernest Hemingway and his teammate Hugh Casey when they visited the novelist's mansion in Havana during Spring Training in 1942.

James “Cool Papa” Bell, was a star in the Negro Leagues for nearly two decades but was kept out of the majors because of the color barrier. Bell was a contemporary of Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige and he eventually was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1974. He describes his experiences in the Jim Crow South that sound all too familiar:

"When we played the Birmingham Black Barons in their park, there were always lots of whites in the crowd, but they were separated by a rope. You could be sitting right next to a white man, but that rope was always there. That was the system they had in those days. That’s what they called states’ rights. States’ rights doesn’t mean much to the Negro. You don’t get justice with states’ rights. Which is a bad thing to happen.”

Johnny Mize

Big Johnny Mize, grew up in Demorest, Georgia and played with the St. Louis Cardinals' Gas House Gang in the 1930s. The Cardinals general manager then was the famous Branch Rickey who later signed Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers breaking the color barrier in the majors in 1947. (One of the chapters is on a lesser-known player Clyde Sukeforth, who after his playing days scouted Robinson and literally introduced him to Rickey.)  Mize didn’t think so much of Branch Rickey who low-balled Mize in contract negotiations, which was indicative of the complete control owners had over the players' livelihoods. Mize spent the last five years of his career as a pinch-hitter for the New York Yankees, playing in a string of World Series for the World Champions. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1981.

Honig saves arguably his best for last --  the story of Brooklyn Dodger Pete Reiser, who probably would have been a Hall of Famer had he not been injury prone. At his first Spring training, Reiser’s manager Leo Durocher, was the first to recognize Reiser’s speed once bet $100 with Dodgers General Manager Larry MacPhail that Reiser could be beat the fastest man in the Dodgers organization in a foot race. Says Reiser:

“So here all of a sudden I’m running against the fastest guy in the Dodger organization, and the manager and the general manager are betting $100 on it. And all I’d wanted to do was come down there and work out in a big-league camp and mind my business.

Well, I did beat the guy. Yeah, by 10 yards."

We end this posting with a baseball lullaby, "Van Lingle Mungo" by Dave Frishberg:

 

 

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P.S. The artwork at the top of the post is on display at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The mixed media piece "Strike Zone" by Mike Ross was inspired by Ted Williams' book The Science of Hitting. The photograph of Johnny Mize is from the HOF archives. Thanks to my former teammate (college intramural basketball team) Tom Bowen for introducing me to this book.

Airplane Reading

This month I have made roundtrip plane trips from Atlanta to Berlin and then Atlanta to Los Angeles. Proper reading material is always a critical decision because it can make the difference between a tolerable flight or a miserable flight. 

I never trust the entertainment consoles. They may not work (as mine didn't) or they are populated with content that you didn't bother to watch at home. Even if you are interested in one of the inflight movies you will need your magnifying eyewear and a better set of earphones than the airline has provided. (I guess I am supposed to bring my own computer and content...)

The reason I bring this up is that I had the good fortune to hit pay dirt when I brought German author and graphic artist Judith Schalansky's Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Island I Have Not Visited and Never Will (2009) with me on the  four hour+ flight from LA to Atlanta.

The book practically fits in your back pocket and can share space your gin and tonic on the wobbly tray table. But the book also takes you to other places far away from the crowded cabin.  Schalansky credits the idea when she surveyed a giant globe in the Berlin National Library and began studying the tiny islands names that dot the blue expanses of the ocean.  First she collected the facts including their longitude and latitude coordinates, their current population (if any), a timeline of major events and their distance to nearby continents or other remote islands. Some you may have heard of such places as Easter Island, Iwo Jima, or Christmas Island but she gives equal billing to some uninhabited ones like Deception Island (near Antarctica), Bouvet Island (in the South Atlantic) or the cold and barren Lonely Island (near the Arctic Circle). 

She dedicates four pages to each entry/chapter. The first two pages provides the facts and the timeline and a detailed map including points of interest such as elevation, bays and any villages. Pages 3 and 4 are very short essays about the history or geological/biological makeup of the place such as the Pacific isle of Banaba, which is made up entirely of phosphate from centuries of bird guano buildup. Schalansky's writing style has been aptly  described in The Paris Review " as a prose poem of sorts. Facts sit side-by-side with a kind of highly personal fiction; we are given latitudes and detailed maps, but also lore and speculation."

What makes it special for airline travelers is that when reading about hardships like near starvation, or freezing to death while discovering these often hostile piles of volcanic rock, you don't feel so angry when the flight attendant ignores your request to reset your entertainment console. How can you complain? What also makes the book ideal in a plane setting is that my attention span often wanes during the flight, (I'm always checking other passengers viewing habits.) With just four pages per chapter if  you start to drift you can easily refocus and return to these compelling stories. 

Once you've reached your final destination, and you are greeted with a "How was your trip?" Instead of ranting about the hideous coffee, the sloppy mask wearing of the traveler across the aisle, or the sticky bathroom floors, you can quote Schalansky instead:

"There is no untouched garden of Eden lying at this never-ending globe. Instead, human beings traveling far and wide have turned into the very monsters they chased off the maps." 

Something to discuss while you wait for your luggage.

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